Problematic licensing arrangements

I have a license for PGP Desktop software through work. When I’m away, I need to use Windows for work and whole disk encryption is essential when you’re travelling. I just returned from several months abroad, I re-installed my laptop including PGP Desktop 9.9 as usual and ran the licensing agent. There was an error message:

An error has occurred: bad parameters.

Super descriptive. I Googled it and learned a couple of things:

Symantec now owns the software and the only advice online is that a firewall is probably blocking the activation.

Rather than a firewall blocking the connection it appears that this version of PGP’s update and licensing server is no longer active.

The open source alternatives will accept my PGP keyring but not decrypt a virtual hard disk.

PGP 6.02i is still available free from this site. It doesn’t play nicely with 64 bit Windows and it can’t decrypt a drive from a newer version of PGP.